How does a visual artifact
go about the rhetorical task of the presenting that which
it depicts, or otherwise represents, as the real?
This class, organized thematically, examines a number of
intriguing figures and devices that have been active for
this purpose within the Western cultural sphere since the
Renaissance: perspective, trompe-l'oeil, mapping,
color and touch, utopia, and money. In the spirit
of the emerging program in Visual Studies at UC Irvine,
our explorations will be centered on visual concerns; but
that hardly means the class should be of interest to art
and film historians alone. We will need to consider,
for instance, the very applicability of the textual figure
of "rhetoric" to visual images (the visual, can,
after all, figure the real as the non-textual), or (to activate
another disciplinary valence) the possibility that our own
practice of history writing figures itself, in some sense,
as a window onto the real of the past. The seminar,
in short, is designed to appeal to scholars across the Humanities—literary
critics, historians, and so forth—interested in exploring
the cultural production of that which lies beyond the representations
of culture, ostensibly in the realm of the real.
